But since so much of a romance novel involves interaction between a man and a woman, a large percentage of the book portrays the two main characters talking to each other. If your romantic hero sounds like a girlfriend instead of a man, your readers will be dissatisfied even if they can't quite diagnose the reason why they don't like him.
By the time you start writing, however, your own gender-based conversational habits are already so ingrained that you've probably stopped noticing the differences in the ways men and women talk. That makes it difficult for you to create natural-sounding dialogue for a character of the opposite sex.
So here are the main ways in which real men and women differ when it comes to talking—and how your characters should differ if they're going to be convincing.
Status vs. Intimacy
In general, men approach conversation with an eye toward maintaining status and independence, reporting or obtaining information, and solving problems. Women seek to establish intimacy and rapport, share feelings, and build relationships.
Women ask questions to encourage interaction; men usually ask questions to get specific information. Men make more statements; women ask more questions.
Men say "I'm sorry" as an apology for a wrong they've done; women say "I'm sorry" to indicate regret or sympathy or concern over a situation, whether or not they played any part in causing it. Men rarely say "I don't know," and they seldom phrase ideas as questions, as in "Have you thought of ...?"
Men tend to make decisions, while women try to create consensus. Men tend to make demands, but women tend to express preferences, and women are more likely to volunteer their reasons for those preferences.
Men use shorter and fewer sentences; women use longer, more complex sentences and string more of them together. Men say something is blue; women say it's robin's-egg blue, or navy, or teal.
Men talk about actions or things; women talk about feelings. Men make declarations; women, even when they make a statement, tend to follow it up with a question. "Pizza is the best food on earth, don't you think?" is a feminine sentence.
Women tend to phrase a preference or request as a question and then become annoyed at a negative response. When she says "Would you like to go out for dinner?" she really means she has no intention of cooking tonight. If her husband then answers the question he thought she was asking and says no, he's going to be in the doghouse—and completely confused about how he got there.
Women tend to use euphemisms; men seldom do. A woman might say "I'm not at all pleased." A man is more likely to say "I'm mad as hell." Women are likely to express sympathy directly, men to joke or use playful put downs.
In this example from her single title The Marriage Lesson, Victoria Alexander shows her hero getting sympathy and advice from his friends:
"I am in love with her." His voice held a touch of awe.
"It's about time you realized it." Rand grinned.
"And more to the point," Pennington said, "she's in love with you."
"I'm in love with her," Thomas murmured. "And she's in love with me." The truth struck him like a slap across the face. "Bloody hell." He bolted upright and clapped his hand to his forehead. "That's what she wanted to hear, wasn't it? When she kept asking why I wanted to marry her? She wanted me to tell her I loved her."
"I believe you said fate, at that moment," Rand said wryly.
Pennington chuckled. "Lord Witless does seem more and more appropriate."
Thomas groaned. "I have made a mess of it all."
"It's probably not too late to fix things." Pennington sipped his drink. "She might well be amenable to listening to your abject apologies—"
"And declaration of love," Rand said.
"And don't forget groveling," Berkley threw in. "Women love groveling."
"In the morning," Pennington continued. "After she's had a chance to sleep on it. Life always looks better at the start of a new day."
If the situation were reversed, the heroine's friends might well make the same suggestions, but they'd do so in a much warmer and more empathetic manner.
Gender-Specific Dialogue
It's difficult for a writer to create completely convincing dialogue for a character of the opposite gender. But you can make your dialogue more realistic by checking your dialogue against a list of the ways in which most writers go wrong.
If You're a Woman
Here's how to make your hero's dialogue more true to gender if you're a female writer:
• Check for questions. Men tend to request specific information, rather than ask rhetorical questions. If your hero's questions can't be answered with a brief response, can you rephrase them? Instead of asking questions at all, can he make statements?
• Check for explanations. Men tend to resist explaining; they generally don't volunteer justification for what they do. If you need him to explain, can you give a reason why he must?
• Check for feelings. Men tend to share feelings only if stressed or forced; they're more likely to show anger than any other emotion. They generally don't volunteer feelings. If you need your hero to spill how he's feeling, can you make it more painful for him to not talk than to share his emotions?
• Check for details. Men tend not to pay close attention to details; they don't usually notice expressions or body language; they stick to basics when describing colors and styles. Can you scale back the level of detail?
• Check for abstractions. Men tend to avoid euphemisms, understatements, comparisons, and metaphors. Can you rephrase your hero's dialogue in concrete terms?
• Check for approval-seeking behavior. Men tend to be direct rather than ask for validation or approval. Can you make your hero's comments less dependent on what the other person's reaction might be?
If You're a Man
Here's how to make your heroine's dialogue more realistic if you're a male writer:
• Check for advice. Women tend to sympathize and share experiences rather than give advice. Can you add empathy to your character's reactions and have her talk about similar things that happened to her, rather than tell someone what he should do?
• Check for bragging. Women tend to talk about their accomplishments and themselves in a self-deprecating fashion rather than a boastful one. Can you rephrase her comments in order to make her laugh at herself?
• Check for aggressiveness. Women tend to be indirect and manipulative; even an assertive woman usually considers the effect her statement is likely to have before she makes it. Can you add questions to her dialogue, or add approval-seeking comments and suggestions that masquerade as questions?
• Check for details. Women notice styles; they know what colors go together (and which don't); and they know the right words to describe fashions, colors, and designs. Can you ramp up the level of specific detail?
• Check for emotions. Women tend to bubble over with emotion, with the exception that they're generally hesitant to express anger and tend to do so in a passive or euphemistic manner. If you need your heroine to be angry, can you give her a really good reason for yelling?
• Check for obliviousness. Women notice and interpret facial expressions and body language, and they maintain eye contact. If you need your female character to not notice how others are acting, can you give her a good reason for being detached?
1. Eavesdrop (politely) as real people talk. How do two women speak to each other? How do two men speak to each other? How do a man and a woman speak to each other?
2. Can you guess the nature of each relationship? For instance, do you think the couple you've listened to is newly dating or long-married? On what evidence did you base your opinion?
3. Write a dialogue using what you've learned and applying the appropriate checklists from pages 167-168.
4. Read your dialogue aloud. Unnatural lines may hide on the page, but they tend to leap out when spoken.
5. Listen to someone else read your dialogue aloud. Better yet, get a man and a woman to read the appropriate parts. How do
the lines sound? How do they feel to the speakers?
WHEN NOT TO TALK ABOUT SOMETHING
Dialogue is an important part of story-showing, but some writers allow their stories to be talked to death. Straightforward narration is sometimes a better way to handle information.
Here's a list of what not to do with your dialogue:
• Don't talk about every single event. Not every action that happens in your story is important enough to be talked about. Not every word that passes a person's lips is crucial to the story line. Showing two people talking about something as insubstantial as the weather occasionally serves a purpose—perhaps to illustrate how uncomfortable they are talking about anything else. But keep this kind of conversation brief, and always consider whether the talk is there for a reason or if it's just filling space.
In her short contemporary romance Captive in His Bed, Sandra Marton uses such unimportant chat to illustrate how her hero's brothers begin their campaign to get the hero, Matthew, to talk about his troubles:
The brothers settled in their favorite booth and gave the waitress their order.
Alex commented on the weather. Cam commented on the traffic. Matthew made no comment at all.
Cam cleared his throat. "So ... how was Colombia?"
Note that the entire buildup to the real conversation is finished in a single paragraph, just sixteen words in all.
• Don't substitute dialogue for action. It's usually better to show an important event than to have two characters talk about it later. If a bomb's going off in your story, show us what the blast looks like, feels like, sounds like, smells like, tastes like. Don't skip to the next day and have your heroine tell her best friend how scared she was by the explosion.
• Don't repeat dialogue. If Harry and Fred have an important conversation, report it—but then don't show Harry telling Sue word for word what Fred told him. Summarize, or leave it out altogether.
• Don't crowd the conversation. Whenever possible, limit the number of characters involved in a conversation. Dialogue means, literally, an exchange between two people. While some discussions can involve groups, dialogue is easiest to handle and most effective when it involves only two. Isolate your characters. If necessary, take them off to a quiet corner of a crowded room. Sometimes the most effective arguments are those conducted in very low voices to keep from drawing the attention of others.
• Don't convey data to your readers by showing characters exchanging information they have known for some time. Showing an established member of a group explaining the rules to a new member makes sense, but two longtime members aren't likely to sit around the clubhouse talking over the regulations. The mother of one teenager isn't going to say to the mother of another teenager, "Your son John, who is seventeen, is coming to visit our son Stanley, who is almost
eighteen, for dinner tonight after football practice, which ends at seven p.m." Presumably, John's mother already knows her son's practice schedule, to say nothing of his name and age.
If you must give your readers information your characters already know, and you want to do it in dialogue, look for a natural way to express the facts. One woman might say to her friend, "I know you loved him, honey, but the man's been dead for six years!" She would not say, "The man you loved died six years ago." You've shared exactly the same information, but you've put an entirely different spin on the conversation.
In Marion Lennox's medical romance The Doctor's Rescue Mission, the author gives the readers important information about a medical condition by having her doctor-hero explain it to a young patient:
"I was the one who assessed your mother before she left," Grady was telling her. "... There didn't seem to be any intracranial swelling."
"Intracranial swelling?"
"Sometimes when people hit their heads they bleed into their brains," Grady told the girl. "... You open people's eyes and check their pupils. ... I shone a light into your mother's eyes and her pupils reacted just as they should. Also, her pupils stayed exactly the same as each other. That's a really good sign."
If Lennox's hero had explained the symptoms of a concussion to the heroine, who's also a doctor, the conversation would have been illogical and a waste of both professionals' time.
HANDLING DIALOGUE
Here are some basic guidelines for crafting solid dialogue between your characters—rules and techniques that will help keep your readers on track and in tune with your story:
• Pace your dialogue to relate to the action—long sentences for a slow and thoughtful scene, short and abrupt sentences at a time of action, tension, or suspense.
• Always tell the readers there's a new character in the scene before that person speaks. Remember that your readers can only see as much of the scene as you've painted for them. If they don't know a new character has come into the scene—if that person just starts speaking out of nowhere—the readers will be confused.
• When writing a child's speech, do your research. Listen to a child of the appropriate age until you can mimic his unusual speech patterns. A child moves through precise patterns of incorrect grammar in the development of perfect speech; your readers will be uncomfortable if you violate these patterns, even though they may not know exactly why. If your character is a very small child, consider paraphrasing most of what the child says and using only simple phrases in direct quotes. Doing so is tidier and easier to read.
• Use slang with extreme caution. Today's catchwords are almost guaranteed to be dated by the time a book is put into print. What is new and fresh in the center of the nation may already be dead on the coasts. If you must use slang, make sure that its meaning is clear from the context in which it's used and that it's appropriate to the historical period, the locality, and the character.
• Don't even try to spell out a sound that is not a word. It's much better to say
"She screamed" and leave the details to the readers' imagination than to try to reproduce the actual sound.
• Avoid expletives and profanity. As a rule, romances don't contain too much foul language. Inspirationals contain none at all—ever. Most midrange romances stop at hell and damn, though single-title and chick-lit romances may indulge in the likes of fuck, Christ almighty, or shit. When considering the use of expletives
or profanity, keep in mind the characters and the circumstances—a professional woman is less likely to cut loose in her workplace than at a party or on the beach. And remember that when words are written down on paper they're more emphatic than when they're spoken. While your hero probably wouldn't use shucks or darn, it's usually better to back down at least one step from what a real person would say in the same circumstances. Or avoid the problem altogether by writing "He swore," and let the readers mentally fill in whatever expression they wish—or whichever one shocks them.
• When using foreign or unfamiliar words and phrases, translate. Readers unfamiliar with the language may feel left out if they don't understand the reference and can't look it up easily. Look for ways to give the meaning in English without making your readers feel as if you think they're too ignorant to understand it on their own. In her short contemporary Legally Tender, Michele Dunaway gives a hand to the readers who don't understand Spanish:
Bruce walked up to one of the doors and knocked on the peeling paint. ... "Maria," he called. "Maria Gonzales. Me llamo Bruce Lancaster. Open the door. I must talk to you. Clara sent me."...
"Let me try," Christina said. ... "Maria! Soy Christina Jones, la social de Bruce. Por favor abra la puerta. Le necesitamos hablar. Es muy importante." "What did you say?" Bruce asked.
"I told her I'm your partner and I asked her to open the door. It's important."
By setting the scene up this way, Dunaway must translate the phrases for Bruce— so the readers aren't made to feel dumb if they didn't get it on their own.
THE MECHANICS OF WRITING DIALOGUE
When it comes to formatting your dialogue on the page, there are a number of basic guidelines that
can help you make clear to your readers exactly who's talking at any given moment. Here are the fundamental three:
1. Enclose the exact words of the speaker—a direct quote—in quotation marks. For instance:
He asked, "Will you help me?"
Only the exact words used by the speaker should be included in the quotation marks. If you're not using the exact words, summarize the sense of the sentence in narrative form and don't use quotation marks, as in the following indirect quote:
He asked if she would help him.
2. Begin a new paragraph every time the speaker changes, no matter how briefly each speaks.
Beth said, "Why?"
"Because it seemed the right thing to do, that's why."
3. Begin a new paragraph whenever you draw the readers' attention to a character other than the speaker, even if that person doesn't say anything.
Beth felt stunned. Attributions
Attributions let your readers know who is speaking. As the author, you know who's saying what—but your readers aren't going to be as closely attuned to your characters, and they can't read your mind. You owe it to the readers to make it as easy as possible to follow who is talking. Dialogue tags—the he said, she said phrases that specifically state who's talking—are, of course, the most obvious way to attribute dialogue.
Keep in mind that, contrary to what your third-grade teacher probably told you, there is nothing wrong with the verb said. In fact, since the eye tends to skip over the word, the readers get the meaning without being interrupted or jolted. Said is almost invisible on the page because the readers are so used to it.
Some other verbs, like shouted, whispered, and murmured, are just as useful because they tell the readers exactly how the sentence was expressed. Others, like orated, gritted, and averred, are annoying and intrusive. Verbs like laughed and smiled shouldn't be used in dialogue tags because one cannot smile or laugh words.
Adverbs added to said or to another attributive verb can be problematic. Many are useful in showing the precise way a sentence was spoken (she said quietly). But others are annoying (he interjected grittily), just plain silly [she giggled girlishly), or redundant (he shouted angrily).
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